The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [177]
On the day they were scheduled to fly back to Shanghai, the teenagers disappeared from the Los Angeles airport. Fearing abduction and a possible international crisis, American authorities launched an investigation, only to discover that the youths had been spirited away to private homes, to be enrolled in a different English-language program. The situation created terrible press for the Shanghai families and inspired proposals within the PRC to bar all high school teenagers from studying overseas. When interviewed later, a few parents said they had wanted to give their children better opportunities by having them live in the United States. “In China, we can have only one child,” said one father, with tears in his eyes. “These are our princes and princesses. We will do anything for them.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
High Tech vs. Low Tech
For the United States, unanticipated success in the international sphere during the 1980s paved the way for unbridled prosperity at home in the 1990s. A forty-year nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union had ended in 1989 not with a bang but with a series of cheers across Eastern Europe as the Berlin Wall was demolished by people using nothing more than sledgehammers and bare hands. When one satellite state after another broke away from the Soviet bloc, and when in 1990 and 1991 the republics of the Soviet Union declared themselves to be independent nations, the United States found itself the winner of the cold war by default. Miraculously, the long-dreaded and seemingly inevitable nuclear apocalypse had never materialized. The disintegration of America’s former antagonist brought to Americans a new era of confidence born of the fact that the United States was now the world’s number one economic and military power.
Supporters of Ronald Reagan like to say that he ended the cold war not by backing off from the arms race but by accelerating it. According to this scenario, he engaged the Soviet Union in a high-stakes, no-rules poker game that threatened to bankrupt both countries, but a game in which the poorer of the two would have to cry uncle first. This last-stage arms race left the United States two legacies. The first was an enormous national debt, by far the largest ever. But the huge expenditures were not solely for weaponry, but also to develop and support new technologies, especially in computers and information processing. Once unleashed, these technologies placed enormous pressure on the American industrial economy, triggering a business revolution that would have broad social consequences.
In the new economy, power flowed to those who could create or master new technology faster than their competitors. It should be no surprise that the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, would make his fortune in computers, as the co-founder and leader of Microsoft. By the end of the decade, his net worth was estimated at $85 billion, greater than that of entire countries, as well as the one hundred million poorest Americans combined. The wealthiest one percent of America emerged from the 1990s with 40 percent of the country’s assets, twice as much as they had held only two decades earlier.
Meanwhile, the poor—indeed, all those without the skills demanded by this new economy—grew poorer. According to economist Edward N. Wolff, between 1983 and 1995, poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class families—the bottom 40 percent of American society—lost 80 percent of their net worth; when adjusted for inflation for 1995 dollars, their holdings shrank from $4,000 to $900. One reason for the disappearance of their wealth was that highly paid manufacturing jobs, which had once afforded working- and middle-class Americans a certain measure of prosperity, gradually disappeared as corporations farmed labor-intensive work to Third